ASIST @ Pratt is proud to present Copy/Right(?):
A Saturday Symposium, slated to take place on Saturday, May 1,
2010 at 1:00 PM in Room 609 at
the Pratt Manhattan Campus (144 West 14th Street on the
6th floor).All are welcome; attendees not affiliated with Pratt must RSVP
to as[email protected] by Thursday, April
29 in order to gain security clearance.

I am working on reproducing some literature I am pretty sure only had one printing run in 1925. It is an epic poem by an anarchist author, and I am not selling any of the reproductions, just distributing them for a wider readership. How can I find out if it is under any copyright restrictions right now, and does the fact that I am an art student doing this for a school project help at all?

"The answer is that it is very fact-dependent, and I can't assess it just from the facts given -- e.g., 'part of an organization.'

"The TEACH Act (17 USC 108) protects use of materials in online teaching, but it's quite cabined in by various restrictions. If that explicit statutory exemption doesn't work, then it goes to fair use (17 USC 107), and of course that will depend on the various factors.

"The 'safest' course in a short-term sense is to provide only the citations. However, it is not necessarily the 'safest' course in terms of thinking about librarians' responsibilities to fully use legal rights on behalf of our patrons. The practical middle course is to password-protect the materials, which prevents unauthorized access by would-be infringers and by would-be infringement investigators."

Feel free to contact Laura directly (via the email address provided on her site or via Fb).

Greetings radical librarians: I am part of an organization developing an online syllabus for study groups we hope to be launching in 2009. We hope to be using articles from academic journals (and most likely obtained from J-STOR and Project Muse). Since we're posting this syllabus online, are there any issues of copyright that we should be worried about?

My gut feeling is that since we're not conducting these study groups with any kind of fee$, that we're in the realm of fair use, but i'd like a more informed opinion than my gut. Help me out, please!

Your question has two aspects, which may not be as related as you think, but I will try to address them both.

First, as to the history of the R. Long & R.R. Smith company: the following information was gathered by drawing on the expertise of the EXLIBRIS-L email discussion group. An index of Publishers' Trade List Annual contains this entry: "Long, Ray, & R.R. Smith, Inc., NY, 1932; Long & Smith, Richard R., Religion Publications. See Harper & Bros., 1934; see Julian Messner, Inc., 1935-1945." This would indicate that the company was transferred to Messner. Subsequently, "Julian Messner Co. became a division of Simon & Schuster in 1977; presumably all of their copyrights became the property of S&S at that time."